Postcards for a Small Planet
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Copyright Trevor Sparrow
The Natural Capital of Flood Plains
Why Letting Nature Do the Hard Work is the Smartest Investment You'll Never Regret!
Floodplains are the most under-appreciated assets in our natural capital arsenal to fight climate change. For decades we've treated them badly as second rate farmland, we have flattened, ploughed, drained, and built on them. With pressure on more housing, we are now increasingly paving over them, storing up trouble that will lead to evermore frequent catastrophic floods.
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But we are discovering that in their natural state they can provide the flood defence infrastructure and clean up our rivers, without putting up our water bills. They do as good as job as built infrastructure for 1-3% of the cost of all that concrete, and keep on going for years to come, and for free.
What is Natural Flood Management
The only flood defence that gets stronger, greener and cheaper with time, and provides insurance that is prevention not just payout
For decades we have trusted concrete walls and steel gates to keep rivers at bay, yet the simplest, cheapest and most beautiful form of flood defence was sitting under our noses all along, quietly growing all around us. Natural flood Management (NFM) doesn't fight water it befriends it: slowing it with trees, holding it in wetlands, spreading it across fields and meadows. It is flood protection that doubles as habitat creation, carbon capture, and farm support. It is one of those rare ideas where the logical thing and the magical thing are exactly the same.
Nature as Infrastructure & the Pot Hole Economy
Driving capital allocation for optimum ecological & economic impact for the long term
We’ve built an economy that ignores potholes, we have a habit of underfunding maintenance, delaying investment, and discounting the future until systems fail. That same pattern now defines how we treat nature. We extract value but fail to maintain the system that produces it, leaving us exposed to floods, droughts, and ecosystem collapse. Nature is not a luxury it is our life support infrastructure. To fix this, we must invest in restoration, fund ongoing maintenance, and properly account for risk. This is the shift toward managing nature as infrastructure and building the financial system to support it.
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Nature Equity's Nature Intelligence Platform is the operating system to guide investment in Nature as critical infrastructure and allocate capital to optimise the balance between production, resilience and restoring our natural live support system.
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